Yves Saint Laurent at the press conference for his first retrospective 25 Years of Design, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1983. © Roxanne Lowit. Photo: Roxanne Lowit

Yves Saint Laurent at the press conference for his first retrospective, “25 Years of Design,” Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1983. © Roxanne Lowit. Photo: Roxanne Lowit

A short history of luxury designer retrospectives – of Armani, YSL, Alexander McQueen, et al – and their more experimental counterparts illuminates 20th-century ideas of nation-building and fashion’s many possible futures.

 Eva & Franco Mattes, Half Cat (2021) and Untitled (Yellow Cable Tray) (2021), installation view, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2023. © Frankfurter Kunstverein. All images courtesy: the artists and Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia. Photos: Melania Dalle Grave, DSL Studio

Eva & Franco Mattes, Half Cat and Untitled (Yellow Cable Tray), both 2021. Installation view, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2023. © Frankfurter Kunstverein. All images: © Frankfurter Kunstverein. Courtesy: the artists and Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia. Photos: Melania Dalle Grave, DSL Studio

What parts of online life can’t we see, and why? Eva & Franco Mattes’s largest solo show to date sheds light on the internet’s dark corners – and posits peer-to-peer ways out.

 Portrait of Lauren Elkin, 2022. © Sophie Davidson. Courtesy: Penguin Random House

Portrait of Lauren Elkin, 2022. © Sophie Davidson. Courtesy: Penguin Random House

The author of Art Monsters (2023), which takes up women artists whose works reflect the experiences and insights of their own bodies, historicizes the stakes of the unruly feminine.

 Charlotte Salomon, Self-portrait , 1940, gouache. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Courtesy: Collection of the Jewish Museum, Amsterdam

Charlotte Salomon, Self-portrait, 1940, gouache. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Courtesy: Collection of the Jewish Museum, Amsterdam

At Lenbachhaus, Munich, Charlotte Salomon’s monumental proto-graphic novel Leben? Oder Theater? chronicles the comic minutiae and sweeping tragedies of its author’s too-short life.

 Left: Celine Fall 2021 (Hedi Slimane). Right: Celine Spring 2014 (Phoebe Philo)

Left: Celine Fall 2021 (Hedi Slimane). Right: Celine Spring 2014 (Phoebe Philo)

How do clothes “become” us? If the goal is to look effortlessly like ourselves, is style subtraction? In her August column, Joanna Walsh looks at what to lose when choosing minimalism.

 Allen Jones, Table , painted fiberglass, resin, mixed media, glass, and tailor-made accessories, 61x 130 x 76 cm

Allen Jones, Table, 1969, painted fiberglass, resin, mixed media, glass, and tailor-made accessories, 61x 130 x 76 cm. Courtesy: the artist

In an age of burgeoning techno-feudalism, do artistic uses of kink aesthetics work as immunizations against societal violence, or do they amount to just another cope?

 Andrea Bowers, Grief Hope , 2020, neon, 124 x 304 x 10 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Andrea Bowers, Grief Hope, 2020, neon, 124 x 304 x 10 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Andrea Bowers and Mary Weatherford’s duo show at Capitain Petzel, Berlin harmonizes their requiems of eco-grief while insisting on the power of simply taking note.

 View of “Project for a New American Century,” Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023. Photo: Ron Amstutz

View of “Project for a New American Century,” Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023. Photo: Ron Amstutz

In New York, a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney recaps Josh Kline’s horrorcore journalization of the 21st-century precariat.

 Portrait of Milo Rau

Portrait of Milo Rau. Photo: Daniel Seiffert

Wiener Festwochen’s new artistic director unpacks Vienna’s relationship with being provoked, making grotesque demands onstage, and the theater as a total democracy.

 Photo: Adina Glickstein

Photo: Adina Glickstein

Barely sated, Adina Glickstein gets to the bottom of a TikTok culinary trend.

 View of “Nuit américaine,” WIELS, Brussels, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and WIELS, Brussels. Photo: We Document Art

View of “Nuit américaine,” WIELS, Brussels, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and WIELS, Brussels. Photo: We Document Art

An exhibition at WIELS, Brussels, discloses that Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s perpetual-sunset sentimentality is no longer a provocation, but a favorite hue in the mood ring of pop.